Optimizing Architectures for Multi Mission Archives

Greene, Gretchen

Data management systems for new missions are often the end of the chain for design and an area that was in earlier days underestimated. Thanks to the visionaries of our times and measurable increases in science user bandwidth, the value of building a robust archive system is now seen to provide a critical capability for producing newer and greater science. Throughout the astronomical community, teams of scientists and engineers are focussing on how we can build optimized architectures to support multiple missions, both space-based and ground, local and distributed. At Space Telescope Science institute such a team is using the successful foundation of the Hubble Space Telescope archive, incorporating lessons learned into the design and development of the James Webb Space Telescope data management systems, and unifying the MAST public science archive with the operational mission archives. The process of optimizing the architecture components combine the resource efficiency of an internal storage cloud while increasingly leveraging collaborative efforts for shared community development of archive and data processing technology, such as the standard protocols and data models developed by the international Virtual Observatory.